Acid attacks, poison: What Afghan girls risk by going to school – CNN.com

Acid attacks, poison: What Afghan girls risk by going to school – CNN.com

Terrorists will stop at nothing to keep Afghan girls from receiving an education.

“People are crazy,” said Razia Jan, founder of a girls’ school outside Kabul. “The day we opened the school, (on) the other side of town, they threw hand grenades in a girls’ school, and 100 girls were killed.

“Every day, you hear that somebody’s thrown acid at a girl’s face … or they poison their water.”

There were at least 185 documented attacks on schools and hospitals in Afghanistan last year, according to the United Nations. The majority were attributed to armed groups opposed to girls’ education.

“It is heartbreaking to see the way these terrorists treat … women,” said Jan, 68. “In their eyes, a women is an object that they can control. They are scared that when these girls get an education, they will become aware of their rights as women and as a human being.”

Despite the threat of violence, Jan continues to open the doors of her Zabuli Education Center, a two-story, 14-room building where 354 area girls are receiving a free education.

“Most of the (local) men and women are illiterate,” Jan said. “Most of our students are the first generation of girls to get educated.”

Seven small villages make up Deh’Subz, where the school is located. Though Deh’Subz is not Taliban-controlled, Jan has still found it difficult to change the deep-rooted stigma against women’s education.

Amazing work! Free & fair (scientific) education for all is the only way forward. We need to figure out common values and methodologies to tackle humanitarian problems. And this requires a proper understanding of human condition and the physical world around us. Only science can provide this. Nothing else!

Here is the link for the work Razia Jan is doing. For some reason their donate link isnt working. I have mailed them about it. Hopefuly they will fix it soon.http://www.raziasrayofhope.org…

If the females become educated the village idiots will lose control over them; they’re clearly frightened of women in any case; perhaps if they could get their rocks off this vile and viscious nonsense would stop; likewise, if Hitler could have done so humanity might have been saved from the insane tragedy of the second world war.

The thing that gets me about this situation is that the bigoted criminal misogynists aren’t just dismissive of education for females, they’re actively, murderously hostile towards it.

I don’t think we’ve ever really had that in Europe. Sure, there were some horrendously patronising patriarchal attitudes, but they never extended beyond rubbishing the intellectual achievements of females and providing no official funds for their education. There was a widespread belief that educating girls was a waste of time, that they couldn’t learn, that their brains were wired up differently and so on, but never that educating them was actively harmful to society.

Which leads me to believe that this is all about fear, rather than ignorance. They genuinely realise that educating females is a danger to their patriarchal way of life.

They have been told that women were created defective by a prophet who perfected their religion for them. That is all the excuse they need to treat their women worse than feral dogs.

That their prophet was also a mysoginist is no wonder, he was also an illiterate brigand, a paedophile and a psychopathic pseudologue. But that doesn’t matter because he was elected by Allah through Gabriel and they know this to be true because their holy book was written by their illiterate prophet!

There is no point in expecting his ardent followers to be rational and good men. The true way for them is only Mohammed’s way. Only if they begin to be selective about the Koran the way Xtians pither around with the bible will there be a glimmer of hope. The Koran permits no equivocation. The ‘almost sane’ bits are abbrogated by later verses preaching the depths of inhumanity and violence. To question or disobey is a terrible doom! There is little hope.

It makes me sick to think that, almost certainly, we will see this brave woman in the media again, after she is killed by stone age lunatics. I am so stuck about the war in Afghanistan. So many lives lost to prop up another hopelessly corrupt client government – but without the west being there people like this and women in general will not have a snowball’s chance in hell. What do others think?

Religion is a cause of suffering and evil, why is that not enough? For something to be considered bad must it be the one true cause of all that is bad, must it be essentially evil? I always thought the devil was a religious idea.

When you get right down to it humanity is at the root of all evil, but if you get rid of humanity, what’s left? I say we get rid of religion first and see if humanity functions a bit better without it.

When are they going to start calling a spade a spade? The monsters who carry out these acid attacks on women and girls are NOT terrorists. They are RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISTS. (yes caps on, I’m angry!). Why won’t the UN do it’s job? I think we know why, they don’t want to be seen to be against a religion – well then they are not doing their job, so that would be ummm…..corruption! Corruption in the name of religion.

I completely agree with you. There seems no way to get our United Nations back from the grip of communist and other corrupt regimes. It appears that communist govts are similer to religions in that they can’t abide the thought of the average man or woman on the street having self authority. They are reallly cowardly bullies of the worst kind. We need a way to take back our UN.

It is truly the cause. Remember, Islam is not just the Quran, it’s what gets talked about at every service and builds up in the culture. Religion is the cause, take religion away and the horrors cease.

At the risk of being branded a fascistic vicious reactionary I believe the punishment should not only fit the crime but act as a deterrent.

Therefore I would not be too saddened to see these moronic thugs gelded, and I mean the surgical removal of scrotum AND penis, for attacking women and girls, plus the removal of the right hand for stealing the girls peace of mind.

Not much chance of it happening of course. I’m still just about opposed to the death penalty, so my thin veneer of civilisation has not entirely been stripped away.

…don’t forget also for recruiting and otherwise harming boys, teenagers and men. (they won’t be needing that right hand anyway)

But seriously, I don’t endorse this type of punishment, though I must admit I’m otherwise at a loss as to what to do with these people. Can the world’s women wait for education to catch up to these clowns?..Should they have to wait?

The day we opened the school, (on) the other side of town, they threw hand grenades in a girls’ school, and 100 girls were killed.

Did this really happen? Surely the murder of so many children would have been an international cause célèbre, as were the events in Beslan in Russia in 2004, but I don’t remember hearing about any such attack in Afghanistan on the news and can’t find any mention of it online that doesn’t also mention Razia Jan.

Are you one of those guys who tries to turn every discussion about injustices towards women into a thread about injustices towards men? There seem to be a lot of you about lately. I have a theory about this. I think it is a way for chauvinists to make women’s special problems seem insignificant, or not largely restricted to them, thus making feminism appear redundant. Do you think I’m onto something there?

In the case of Islam, “religious fundamentalist” actually becomes a pleonasm, because a Muslim has to be a fundamentalist in order to be a Muslim. (They have to accept the entire Quran and the Prophet’s Sunna.) But one mustn’t offend religious feelings by calling a spade a spade…

I am heartened by Razia Jan’s courage and the courage of the young girls and their families, including their MALE family members that risk their lives to give these girls the opportunity for an education. Education is crucial to relieving the oppression of women in Islam and reducing the lure into terrorist activity for young Muslim men(and women). It is often the illiterate, poor, and hopeless that get bullied or brainwashed into accepting the barbaric practices being preached by some Muslim leaders who themselves almost never adhere to the stone-age beliefs peddled to their congregants.

Unlike some posters here, I have been exposed to a variety of Muslims from many countries and understand that Islam is not practiced the same by all Muslims. In the college town where I reside, young Muslim women from Malaysia, Syria, Pakistan, the US (mostly Blacks) and other countries are abundant. They study teaching, nursing, engineering, medicine and many other disciplines. Some wear the headscarf and flowy jilbabs (dress like covering). Others wear jeans and t-shirts, with or without a headscarf. So, there are many Muslims who do not subscribe to the believe that girls/women shouldn’t be educated or that they must be covered from head to toe.

Islam is a relatively young religion and it will evolve and discard some of their primitive beliefs just as Christianity and other religions have. Check around and you will see that it is happening. There are even Muslims that accept homosexuality as *gasp* normal. Hopefully those groups will become more visible as time goes on.

My resolution now is to support efforts like Razia Jan’s that are seeking to educate girls and women, whether they be Muslim or not. I am sickened by the oppression that many girls and women all over the world are subjected to in the name of religion or culture.

“Islam is a relatively young religion and it will evolve and discard some of their primitive beliefs just as Christianity and other religions have.”

You can’t state that as a fact. Islam isn’t as similar to other religions as many people claim, so there aren’t many good reasons to assume this will happen as a part of some natural evolution that applies to religions.

Does anybody know what the exact interpretation of which Quranic verses and/or hadith that leads to this kind of evil looks like? It seems to be a specifically afghani/talibani way of interpreting Islam, doesn’t it? I usually ride the Islam-is-Islam-wagon, but sometimes I have doubts about specific behavior.